The GNU Manifesto | Page 4

restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is
that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.
This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that
result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so.
Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the
world in general of all or part of that creativity.
"Won't programmers starve?"
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to
get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result,
condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do
something else.
But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that
without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly
it is all or nothing.
The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get
paid for programming; just not paid as much as now.
Restricting copying is not the only basis for business in software. It is the most common
basis because it brings in the most money. If it were prohibited, or rejected by the
customer, software business would move to other bases of organization which are now
used less often. There are always numerous ways to organize any kind of business.
Probably programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now. But that is
not an argument against the change. It is not considered an injustice that sales clerks
make the salaries that they now do. If programmers made the same, that would not be an
injustice either. (In practice they would still make considerably more than that.)
"Don't people have a right to control how their creativity is used?"
"Control over the use of one's ideas" really constitutes control over other people's lives;
and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights(6) carefully (such as
lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed
intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts
of legislation for specific purposes.

For example, the patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the
details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors.
At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of
advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for
whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up
production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals
who use patented products.
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other
authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way
many authors' works have survived even in part. The copyright system was created
expressly for the purpose of encouraging authorship. In the domain for which it was
invented--books, which could be copied economically only on a printing press--it did
little harm, and did not obstruct most of the individuals who read the books.
All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought,
rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any
particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What
kind of act are we licensing a person to do?
The case of programs today is very different from that of books a hundred years ago. The
fact that the easiest way to copy a program is from one neighbor to another, the fact that a
program has both source code and object code which are distinct, and the fact that a
program is used rather than read and enjoyed, combine to create a situation in which a
person who enforces a copyright is harming society as a whole both materially and
spiritually; in which a person should not do so regardless of whether the law enables him
to.
"Competition makes things get done better."
The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone
to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders
are wrong in assuming it always works this way. If the runners forget why the reward is
offered and